The Best Dual Mode Bang For Your Buck!

Kyle Brocious here.

I’m a Technical Support Representative at VoIP Supply. My core responsibilities are to listen to customers’ needs, specifications, and answer any questions about a product or solution on a post-sales basis. I started my career with VoIP Supply back in October 2007 as a provisioning and testing specialist. This position allowed me to get a firm understanding of the VoIP technology, specific product applications and uses, and proper setup and configurations on an open-sourced, SIP-based environment.

I would like to talk about a product that has been in my sights for some time now. That product is the UTStarcom GF210 Dual mode phone, and by “dual mode” I mean it uses a GSM (Cell Phone Network) and a VoIP WiFi Network.

Since the introduction of the phone back in December 2006 I have had the pleasure of working with this piece of equipment only a handful of times. This is due to the ease of setup and the durability of the hardware.

When it comes to setting up the GSM network capabilities of this phone it is as easy as removing the battery and sliding in a SIM card from your cell phone carrier, then re-inserting the battery and powering on the unit. The process should take no more than two minutes to complete.

As for the WiFi setup, that will take some patience and a little maneuvering of the phone User interface. After timing the complete process and verifying the registration, it took a little over seven minutes. Overall that is not bad, considering that other UTStarcom products take about double that.

A few of the features that I would like to point out are a 1.8 inch 65k color display, text messaging, polyphonic ringtones, MMS support, built-in games and a WAP browser.

Compared to the existing WiFi phones offered from Linksys, Hitachi, and D-Link, the UTStarcom GF210 is fairly inexpensive, retailing on VoIPSupply.com at $239.99, which makes it a very affordable personal class phone for all types of environments and applications.